Michael Giallourakis writes:
> Hello, I am interested in assessing characteristics of organizational
> culture that enhance innovations or technology developments. My
> question is this. Is there an organizational culture scale that would
> help in my research. If so, please respond to me at:
> mgiallourakis@cobilan.msstate.edu
>
> All advice is welcome and thanks.
> --
> Michael
I too am struggling with these issues. One place to start would be
with a book by William E. Schneider, "The Reengineering Alternative:
A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work" - 1994, Irwin
Professional Publishing.
Culture in this book is defined as "The way we do things around here
in order to succeed." This is basically focussing only on management
styles and decision making strategies.
This book can almost be looked at as a kind of "Myers-Briggs" for
organizational culture. It categorizes cultures into one of four
types: Control oriented (based on a military model), Collaboration
(based on a family or sports team), competence (based on academic
institutions) and cultivative (based on a religious model).
Each of these cultures are good at some things and not so good at
others. Each has a different outlook on performing work. For
instance one may come up with more innovations (competence) but is
not as good as other culture types for information sharing and
adaptability (colloborative.). This basically says you can't have
everything good in a single culture.
For the most part, this book provides a somewhat simplistic, but very
powerful way to categories how organizations go about their work.
There is even a well thought out survey to help analyze which culture
your orgnaization currently fits in. I think, as with a Myers-Briggs
type test, his categories are overly genralized, and he does not
really leave open the possibility that there could be other
viable organizational types that do not fit on his scale. For
instance, I am not sure where Senge's Learning Organization fits
(you could probably force it into collaborative).
Additionally, Schneider states he does not address the question of
which "culture type" is best suited for each type of environment.
This I consider to be of critical importance. By what criteria would
an organization decide which culture type is most useful for their
particular situation? I would have been satisfied had Schneider
given a discussion of what he considers the issues which make this
difficult to determine.
If nothing else, this book has led me to question my understanding
of culture and has forced me to have a more in-depth approach towards
understanding organizational culture and stability, and what is
necessary to accomplish organizational change. As a follow-on to
this book, I am currently reading "Anthropology of Organizations"
(Routledge:1994, edited by Susan Wright) which provides an
anthropologists perspective (as opposed to a management scientist or
Psychologist's perspective as is so often seen) on organizational
culture. I have nothing to report yet, as I have just started.
Regards,
Noel Dickover
"Noel Dickover" <NDICKOVER@ver.lld.com>